FIL – the progress report

It suddenly occurred to me that I had left the FIL in Intensive Care – permanently it seems….and that you were all out there still holding your breath and praying. Well, I started to fret about this last night – how could I have been so mean to all my cyberspace friends – how many of them were now blue, red or even by this stage (heaven forbid) green…

Anyway, I am delighted to report good news for the family as the FIL responded well (if a little slowly) to all the treatment he received in the Intensive Care Unit. So much so that he was transferred to a regular ward at the end of last week – they had done a great job all ways round with him. Of course, I personally think that to spend a month in Intensive Care is a little bit of an extreme way to get over the initial agonies of an operation, but hey, it seemed to work. His chest has all healed well and the bypass has been a great success. Not bad at all for a 79 year old (albeit one who was pretty active before all this happened). He managed to get some pretty good hallucinations too^*1 and has kept us all highly amused with his stories of saving babies from burning buildings and Fred Flintstone appearing in a porno movie!

All this is good news but his progress is very slow. I think sometimes hospitals make it very easy to simply not try hard enough. He is mostly just sitting back and waiting for his recovery to happen to him without putting in any more effort than he has to. For example, he was disappointed after being transferred to the ward that no-one would feed him – despite the fact that he (albeit slowly) was able to manage a spoon to feed himself. If something is hard work then he would prefer to simply not bother doing it or get someone else to do it for him. It’s true, he is still pretty weak from the extended hospital stay, but yet more inactivity is hardly building him up. I personally find it very frustrating – a little over a year ago I was trying to get back on my feet after my surgery and yet every day set myself a new target so that I could improve as fast as possible. Now, I really don’t want to sound harsh or impatient with him and I know that I am younger and maybe this helped me, but I fear that he now sees himself as a permanent invalid. His surgery, which was supposed to give him a better quality of life, and which has been an incredible success, has been sidelined by his talk of “I don’t care if I can’t ever get around without a zimmer” and “I suppose I’ll have to have the optician and hairdresser come to the house now”…

Aaargh! Is it just me? Am I being unreasonable with the guy? I guess the truth of it all is that its hard when you are eternally pragmatic optimist and you come up against a real dyed in the wool pessimist - especially one with 79 years of practice.


^*1I was incredibly disappointed with my stay in hospital, which, despite copious quantities of morphine, had no more exciting dreams than usual. So not fair – go through all that getting cut in half business and not even a good hallucination to tell people about!